Black Feminist Health Science Studies: Exploring New Possibilities

Abstract

What might a uniquely Black feminist approach to the study of health, science, and technology offer to the field of STS as a whole? Both in contrast to and in conversation with feminist science studies, we propose a critical engagement, Black Feminist Health Science Studies, which is invested in a social-justice based science, one which makes clear the “co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously” (Bailey 2016, 22). As an emergent lens and field, BFHSS is built on existing and growing research that demands a multi-pronged approach to ameliorating the health disparities of Black people. In this vein, our work collectively draws upon the work of a multitude of black sociologists, feminists and critical race scholars including Dorothy Roberts, Alondra Nelson, Cathy Cohen, Ruha Benjamin, and Evelynn Hammonds among others, as we work to grow an interdisciplinary community which is dedicated to creating better understandings of health for Black communities and to examining the media’s role in framing and disseminating this knowledge.

This panel will bring together scholars invested in the project of imagining a future for STS which takes seriously the contributions of Black feminist engagements with science, technology, health, and medicine. We invite ethnographic work, textual engagements, artistic performance, and any synthesis of these and other modalities to ask what might be possible. What kinds of interruptions, interruptions, and regenerations might a black feminist framework afford the study and experience of health across time and space?

Discussant

• Michelle Munyikwa, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Sick/Not Sick: Intuition, Racism, and Seeing Sickness in Medical Training - Adeola Oni-Orisan, UC San Francisco/UC Berkeley

• Race, Modernity, and Hospital-ity: Questioning the Intervention Space of Clinical Volunteerism - Yesmar Semaj Oyarzun, Rice University

• "You Can't Call It a Party": Black Women's Healthy Love Knowledge and CDC's Science - Kevin M. Moseby, Drexel University

• Perceptions of Health: A Confluence of Aesthetics, Race, and Racism - Ugo Felicia Edu, University of California Davis

• Transgressive Danger: HeLa, Purity, and Contamination - James Doucet-Battle, University of California, Santa Cruz

Session Organizer

• Michelle Munyikwa, University of Pennsylvania